APO Phil News Winter 2023

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Carnival Of Comedians Gary Steel chats with manic multitasker Tom Sainsbury about an upcoming turbo-charged performance of a famous zoological delight. 18 It can be a task to get the kids to sit still and stay tuned in for an hour of orchestral music, even if it is among the most popular classical suites for children. While Saint-Saëns’s Carnival Of The Animals is always a winner with the wee varmints, this August the APO has something the same but also completely different planned for the occasion. In keeping with an age of gaming addictions and short attention spans, this version will provide a visual foil to the entertaining animal frolics of the music. The talented, energetic creative dynamo Tom Sainsbury will be choreographing and joining in with a small dance ensemble, Dynamotion, which will act out the various animal characters musically depicted in Carnival of the Animals, giving it a whole new dimension.
apo.co.nz “It will be interesting and quick and over-stimulating for children for around 50-60 minutes and then they can head on their way!” Sainsbury says, half joking. Dynamotion is a comedy dance troupe that puts on a themed show every year. “The comedy comes first and the dancing comes second,” says Tom, “but we always try getting the dancers really good. We have a narrative, and dance to pop songs or rock’n’roll and country music. The last show we did was a kind of Western-inspired show all about the big themes, revenge and love and with shoot-’em-ups, and it was kind of camp and ridiculous with colourful costumes. The one we did before that was James Bond-inspired, and we’ve also done one that was Terminator-inspired. The last show, I was tied up to a cactus and we had five of the dancers dressed up as cactuses dancing around a totem pole. And three of us played a pig, so the style lends itself to us kind of embodying these animals.” As for Dynamotion’s plans for Carnival of the Animals, Tom says he’s most excited about doing a Fossil dance. “Also, I think Aquarium and Aviary will be beautiful and quite good to do. Others are proving to be a great challenge, like Chicken and the Wild Donkey. We’ll be doing lots of costume changes and interpretive bodies becoming the animals and we’ll have some puppets too.” Tom Sainsbury is one of our most high profile and much-loved comedians, and Phil News caught him just after the closing of the annual Comedy Festival, in which he performed a stand-up routine called Gone Bananas. That’s not the half of it. He’s in a multi-tasking class of his own with a CV bursting with acting credits, screenplays for TV series, several books and, most popular of all, his regular Snapchat satire, in which he uses visual technology to impersonate the characters of some of Aotearoa’s least-liked media and political personalities. Not a musician himself, Tom admits that music is actually his favourite thing of all, and says he grew up in a house in rural Matamata where Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons was the soundtrack. “We played it on repeat all the time and really got into the dramatics of it. And I was a huge fan of [Prokofiev’s] Romeo and Juliet ballet music. I like indulging in the big emotions that come with that. And Wagner? That’s the peak of drama, right? Yes of course, I love it!” Having recently returned from LA where he was pitching several ideas for TV shows, Kiwis should enjoy him while we still can, and the wildly amusing Dynamotion performance accompanying Carnival of the Animals will be a chance to enjoy his unpredictable creative genius. Carnival of the Animals 11.30am & 2pm, Saturday 12 August Auckland Town Hall apo.co.nz/carnival-animals All about Carnival Of The Animals CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS Composing music in the European classical tradition was a serious business for the late Romantics, so much so that Camille Saint- Saëns refused to have the humorous 14-part children’s suite performed during his lifetime. The French composer might have turned in his grave to learn that his most frivolous work would become his enduring legacy, and vie with the Organ Symphony No.3 as his most popular work. Originally written for two pianos and chamber ensemble, Carnival of the Animals was finally made public in 1922, the year after the composer’s death, and its lively, often humorous musical depiction of a variety of wild animals was an immediate hit. Each of its 14 movements depicts a different animal, including the lion, hens and roosters, wild asses, tortoises, elephant, kangaroos, swan, and even dead fossilised invertebrates. While soundtracks to cartoons would respond to ‘talkies’ from the 1930s on with attempts to musically mimic animals, Carnival of the Animals did it first with a terrific combination of comedy and wit. As Figaro wrote of the work’s first public performance: “From the first note to the last it is an uninterrupted outpouring of a spirit of the highest and noblest comedy. In every bar, at every point, there are unexpected and irresistible finds. Themes, whimsical ideas, instrumentation compete with buffoonery, grace and science.” So, in a sense, this orchestra-plus Dynamotion version of Carnival of the Animals features music portraying animals while the onstage dancing/ acting will attempt to visualise those musical gestures. But it’s perhaps not so strange after all: when the work was privately performed in the late 19 th century the musicians often wore animal masks. 19
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APO Phil News Winter 2023

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